Conference Agenda

While sightreading remains one of the most frustrating skills that a keyboardist must cultivate, its emergence in nineteenth-century pianism remains underexplored in musicology. This paper argues that sightreading emerged as a distinct performative act precisely when keyboard improvisation was on the decline (Gooley 2018). The increased premium on “deciphering” spawned a musical economy that tasked composers with producing preparatory “sightreading” pieces destined for single use. This pianistic corpus simulated the contours of musical “works,” whose ontological status rested in their repeatability through memorized performance, but whose journey necessarily began with reading. Set against the gendered climate of the Parisian pianistic scene (Ellis 1995), this paper makes the case that sightreading constituted a crucial discourse of French pianism.

A substantial proportion of that discourse surrounded the curious repertory of pièces de déchiffrage, competition-grade piano pieces that tested Paris Conservatoire students’ sightreading skills in front of a public audience. Critics from musical periodicals developed a unique vocabulary for these peculiar musical events, commenting on both the sightreader and the sightread text. Thus, both student and composer were simultaneously subjected to aesthetic judgment, one dependent on the other. Key to this judgment was a gendered curriculum. Conservatoire exams were segregated by sex, so composers of these pieces (like Massenet, Fauré, and Nadia Boulanger) inscribed their scores as either pour les hommes or pour les femmes. A corpus study of pièces de déchiffrage is ongoing; this paper highlights two unpublished examples by Boulanger (1914). Given that these “works” were necessarily disposable—one only “sightreads” once—press reception offers the only record of how pièces de déchiffrage, like Boulanger’s, generated an aesthetics of spontaneity directed at both composer and reader. I conclude that subjecting pièces de déchiffrage to scholarly scrutiny helps understand the increasing gulf between improvisation, realization, and reading in nineteenth-century music. Sightreading’s critical reception, while gendered, also created avenues for female Conservatoire graduates—such as Eugénie Carjat (1864-1948)—discussed here for the first time in musicological scholarship—to build careers out of the ability to read à première vue.

Mapping the location of provincial conservatoires sponsored by the French State at the turn of the twentieth century reveals a notable feature: the only place with both a secular music school and a cathedral choir school is not Lyon or Lille, Marseille or Bordeaux, but Moulins. This is odd: Moulins was a community of around 22,500 people (1891 census) in a rural part of central France not known for the richness of its concert societies, choirs, chamber music or operatic culture. It had no municipal music school until 1893, at which point a ‘national’ institution sprang up as if from nothing. By contrast, most cognate institutions were already several years old when they attained national status. Meanwhile the cathedral choir school had, from the 1870s, developed wide renown. It was officially recognised in 1883 as a contributor to French heritage preservation and was one of only six such institutions to be brought into the national network of music schools the following year.

Following closely on the death of an ‘intransigent’ bishop in January 1893, and amid ferocious nationwide debates as to whether good French Catholics could serve the Church but also ‘rally’ to the Republic, the inauguration of the secular Moulins music school suggests an environment of straightforward musical and confessional antagonism. However, as recent research might lead us to expect (Petit, Flint, Gribenski, Walker), the close-up view is more complex. Longstanding alliances among musicians and clerics turn out to be at odds with separatism within the town council, ministerial inspectors become choir-school defenders, and at national level we find different ministries and the government at loggerheads. Only in 1902, in the wake of the Dreyfus affair and amid intensifying government anticlericalism, does the traditional narrative of Republican antipathy to Catholic music education win out.

Print and manuscript sources in Catholic and State archives in Paris, Moulins and Nevers enable this microhistorical analysis to function as a possible model for disentangling action and motivation among musicians, functionaries, parliamentarians, and clergy. The Moulins story prompts new reflection on music’s role as social glue amid the swirl of political acrimony.